the joke and his relation to the unconscious

The “free play of ideas” allowed Hirsch to create a new word with a condensation, a combination of two words, that makes “sense in nonsense”, as described before. The joke points to Hirsch’s actual lack of connection with the Baron betraying a “playful judgment” of rich people, creating a “bafflement” and a “light dawning” to the meaning of his invented word famillionaire, and a brevity of saying so much with one sentence. To have wit is to have “the ability to…find hidden similarities”, and “linking two ideas which in some way are contrasted with each other.”Īn example used to illustrate this is from writer Heinrich Heine, about a character of Hirsch-Hyacinth, a lottery-collector and corn-remover, “who boasts to the poet of his connections with the rich Baron Rothschild and finally says: ‘And as truly as God will grant me his blessings, Doctor Heine, I was sitting next to Salomon Rothschild and he treated me just like his equal, quite famillionairely.‘” With more depth some of the opinions move closer to where Freud is heading. Their opinions include ways to view humour as “playful judgment”, “a free play of ideas”, “sense in nonsense”, “bafflement and light dawning.” Lipps emphsizes brevity, “wit says what it does say, not always in few, but always in too few words.” This allows the listener the pleasure to figure things out. They include novelist Jean Paul, psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, and philosophers, Theodor Vischer, Kuno Fischer, and Theodor Lipps.

Like in his book on dreams, Freud begins The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious with a survey of expert opinions on the workings of humour.

The joke and his relation to the unconscious